China's Google clone Baidu also open-sources its AI blueprints

Chinese search-and-everything-else web giant Baidu has joined Google and Facebook in open-sourcing its artificial intelligence (AI) code in a bid to become a standard in an increasingly important market. The company’s Warp-CTC C library has been published on GitHub through its Silicon Valley lab, with an accompanying blog post encouraging developers to try it out. The CTC part stands for “connectionist temporal classification.” This combines different neural network designs to process data that is not perfectly aligned. In other words, making sense of complex patterns. The approach has proved invaluable in speech recognition. Baidu Research built its system on top of CTC to improve its speech recognition products. Speech recognition is a critical component of business in China, thanks to its tonal language and the fact that its written form…